Images of Muhammad by Tarif Khalidi - Excerpt

I M A G E S O F

MuhammadNarratives of the Prophet in Islam Across the Centuries

T A R I F K H A L I D I

DOUBLEDAY

NEW YORK LONDON

TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

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Copyright © 2009 by Tarif Khalidi

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Doubleday Religion,

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a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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Book design by Ellen Cipriano

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Khalidi, Tarif, 1938–

Images of Muhammad / Tarif Khalidi. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Muhammad, Prophet, d. 632—Biography. 2. Muhammad, Prophet, d.

632—Biography—Sources. 3. Muhammad, Prophet, d. 632—

Appreciation. I. Title.

BP75.K4935 2009

297.6'3—dc22

2008036477

ISBN 978-0-385-51816-1

Printed in the U.S.A.

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C o n t e n t s

fP r e f a c e v i i

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Reflections on Muhammad and Biography 1

I T H E T U R N I N G P O I N T

Muhammad in the Qur’an 2 1

I I T H E L E G I S L A T O R

Muhammad in Hadith 3 6

I I I T H E M A S T E R N A R R A T I V E

Muhammad in the Sira 5 7

I V T H E T E A C H E R O F M A N N E R S

Muhammad in Adab 1 0 4

V T H E L I G H T O F T H E W O R L D

Muhammad in Shiite Biographies 1 2 4

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V I T H E M O D E L M Y S T I C

Muhammad in Sufi Literature 1 5 1

V I I T H E P R O P H E T C A N O N I Z E D

Muhammad’s Sira in a New Canonical Age 1 7 5

V I I I T H E U N I V E R S A L M O D E L

Muhammad in Later Medieval Biography 2 0 8

I X T H E H E R O

Muhammad in Modern Biography 2 4 1

X T H E L I B E R A T O R

Muhammad in Contemporary Sira 2 8 1

C o n c l u s i o n 2 9 9

N o t e s 3 0 5

I n d e x 3 3 1

C O N T E N T S

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P r e f a c e

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This is a book that exacts a lengthy toll of apologies and dis-claimers from its author, a litany of excuses longer than the norm.Its subject is the evolution of the images of Muhammad as por-trayed by his community across the centuries. It may be that theintroduction that follows will clarify what is meant by this, butwhat I thought worth attempting was a kind of map of a literarytradition, from its origins to the present. I also suggest that there isa certain symmetry to that tradition. Although numerous studiesexist on disparate aspects of that biographical tradition, I know ofno study that casts an eye on the landscape as a whole. There maytherefore be some value in having a large map, even if somewhatwrinkled and inaccurate in projection.

The sources are truly vast. There is hardly any work in anybranch of Islamic studies written by Muslims, ancient or modern,that does not refer to Muhammad and his sayings or actions. He issimply everywhere in the literature, prose or verse, of his commu-nity. So I decided to confine myself by and large to the genre calledthe Sira, that is to say the genre of formal biography ofMuhammad. Alas, here too the bulk, especially in the premodern

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period, is immense, and several primary works of the Sira will gounmentioned. I hope I have not done great violence to the Sira inomitting them, though other students of the genre will surely putmatters right. Again, the Sira written in Arabic during the premod-ern period occupies center stage in this work, although the seminalmodern contributions of Indian Muslims and Iranians are high-lighted as well.

In telling the story of the Sira, and of other portrayals of his lifethat are not strictly Sira, I have kept away from historicity, from is-sues that have to do with their value as a factual source of informa-tion on Muhammad’s life, although much history can of course belearned from historiography. Instead, I have concerned myself pri-marily with social ideality, by which I mean the manner in which areligious society gradually builds up images of ideal conduct for itscentral figure or figures. I like to think of ideality as a subset of the“social imaginary,” that which drives a religious society to con-struct and reconstruct the ideal lives of its early heroes.

A question I sometimes used to set my students in early Arabic/Islamic history and culture went as follows: “Muslims generallyobject to being called ‘Muhammadans.’ With what justification?” Ino longer remember exactly what I expected from my students asan adequate answer, but this may have included a discussion of thetension between the human Muhammad and the Muhammad ofmiracle. Was he simply a messenger of God or was he more? Andif more, how much more? This book is partially concerned withthe answers to this question provided by the Sira.

But the social ideality of Muhammad is underlain by the loveof his community. In 2006 Muhammad was the subject of a seriesof cartoons in the Danish press. The furor caused by that incident,like almost all similar furors, managed to obscure the raw nervethat these cartoons had touched. I am referring to the fact that lit-

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tle was said throughout that controversy about the love ofMuhammad among his community, although much was said aboutrespect for religious beliefs versus the primacy of free speech. Atthe heart of that incident was the love of Muhammad, which, in thephrase of Muhammad Iqbal, “runs like blood in the veins of hiscommunity.” It was Muhammad as comforter, friend, intercessor,family member that these cartoons seemingly demeaned. A clichéhas gained currency in recent years to the effect that the equiva-lent of Christ in Islam is not Muhammad but the Qur’an. That isnot entirely true. The images of Muhammad collected in this book,from the Sira and other literary sources, may help to show howclose the Prophet has been to his community, how much he re-mains at the center of their affection, and how vividly he stillstands among them.

This book was first suggested by Trace Murphy at RandomHouse. For his patience and constant encouragement, my heartfeltthanks. My thanks also to Darya Porat for her able shepherding ofthis work and to Maggie Carr for her perceptive and elegant copy-editing.

Two colleagues at the American University of Beirut read partsof this work and made numerous suggestions, almost all of whichI immediately incorporated, with gratitude for their concern andcritical acumen: Maher Jarrar and Muhammad ‘Ali Khalidi. I ex-onerate them from any responsibility for what remains.

It was Magda who isolated me from my surroundings while Iwrote, sent me back again and again to my labors, and firmly andlovingly insisted that I finish what I started. This makes her themaraine of all that follows.

TA R I F KH A L I D I

Center for Arab and Middle Eastern StudiesAmerican University of BeirutMarch 10, 2009

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IntroductionREFLECTIONS ON MUHAMMAD AND BIOGRAPHY

The name “Muhammad” means “worthy of all praise.” For fifteencenturies or so this name has reverberated around the world sothat today one in every five human beings calls down daily praisesand blessings upon him, feels secure in his faith and intercession,holds him up as a model of virtue and good manners, and goes onpilgimage to the holy sites he designated, treading the same groundhe once trod. And what of the rest of humanity? One mightassume a wide range of attitudes, all the way from curiosity toadmiration to dread. This book is not a “straight” or “objective” bi-ography of Muhammad—there are more than enough of these. Itis instead a book about his Islamic images. To be more precise, itis a biographical account that attempts to explore the manner inwhich his life has been constructed and reconstructed, designedand redesigned, over the last millennium and a half. How has hiscommunity narrated his biography? And why is Muhammad stillsuch a commanding and fascinating figure in the twenty-first cen-tury?

To introduce the subject, I begin with the core story, which Ishall confine to one paragraph. Muhammad, son of ‘Abdullah son

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of ‘Abd al-Muttalib, was born in Mecca around the year 570 A.D.He began to receive revelations around the year 610 A.D. andshortly thereafter started to preach his faith. During his earlyyears as a preacher he seems to have achieved only a limited suc-cess in his hometown, and he had even less success in winning overconverts from outside Mecca. The turning point in his career camein the year 622 A.D., when he abandoned Mecca for Medina, atown where he had established a small base of converts who wereready to protect him. This move to Medina (hijra) was lateradopted by Muslims to mark the first year of the Muslim, or Hijri,calendar. From Medina Muhammad organized and often led a se-ries of expeditions whose aim was ultimately to conquer Mecca,“God’s sacred precinct,” and thereafter spread the religion of Islaminside and outside Arabia. Mecca fell in 630, another landmarkyear. His followers increased rapidly throughout his years inMedina. The Prophet himself died in Medina in 632.

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This or a similar core story would I think be accepted by the ma-jority of scholars, Muslim and non-Muslim, who concern them-selves with Muhammad’s life. However, the early Muslimbiographical tradition peopled this core story with thousands uponthousands of named and often sharply drawn personalities, menand women whose life stories were intertwined with Muhammad’sown. Muslim biographers seem from an early date to have decidedto include in their biographies of the Prophet the names of everysingle man or woman whose life in some way or another touchedupon or intersected the core narrative. It is as if some earlyChristian Gospel writer had decided to fill out the Sermon on theMount and the feeding of the five thousand with the names and lifestories of every single one of those who were present, togetherwith some account, long or short, of their life and subsequent fate.


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Until about the nineteenth century, the traditional Muslim biogra-phies of Muhammad always place him within a large crowd of hu-manity. He towers over these multitudes, an object of adoration,and yet does not escape their harm, their ridicule, their disobedi-ence, and even their active or secret hostility. “Muhammad diedbut his community lives on” is a widespread Muslim conversa-tional phrase, invoked to stress that life goes on, that no humanbeing is ever indispensable. It is perhaps an echo of that early bi-ographical view that constructed and reconstructed his life as partand parcel of the life of his community. This image of Muhammadamidst his community may also be a reflection of his images in theQur’an, to which I shall later return.

Given this early biographical conception of a prophet embed-ded in his religious community, or umma, it makes sense to try todetermine what lay behind that conception. To begin with, biogra-phy in almost all literary traditions has been seen as the most vividsort of history one can write. It personalizes history, it centers his-tory on individuals, it encapsulates history in a number of individ-ual lives. One might call biography a form of synecdoche, asubstitution of the part for the whole. In this sense, biographystands for or substitutes for history. The smaller life of an individ-ual stands for, symbolizes, prefigures, the larger history of a peo-ple, nation, city, community, or whatever. In fact some cultures atcertain moments—for example, the premodern Islamic—identifiedbiography with history. To them history was biography.1 Hence, inthat conception of biography, the life of Muhammad is inextrica-ble from the history of his umma. But there are other considera-tions, chief among which is the perennial appeal of biography to adeep-seated but not fully explored human curiosity. One recentwriter calls biography “a healthy form of voyeurism,” a sense of in-trigue about a life of achievement. Quite apart from voyeurism,however, is the desire, again perennial, to see through the lives, ex-pected to be transparent, of great leaders. They ought to have

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nothing to hide. We want to know, almost by right, the intimate de-tails of their lives. We want from a biography not only what theperson was like in public but what he or she was like in private. Somemeasure of “voyeurism” may be involved here, but at issue too isthe need to know how the prominent man or woman did some-thing that we all have to do, that is, live from day to day with otherpeople. We all have to get up in the morning, go to work, face a do-mestic crisis and cope with our daily problems. We would like toknow how these great figures coped with these same problems ofeveryday life.

In traditional or premodern Islamic biographies of Muhammad,the need to know both the public and private person was over-whelming. Standing in the very midst of his community, Muhammadcannot and should not escape the community’s closest scrutiny.His public persona, it was felt, must be joined to an examination ofhis life behind closed doors in order to endow his life with com-plete transparency. Everything he did held some example, somelesson or another for the believers. Indeed, his biography (Sira)was sometimes used as a synonym for his normative example(Sunna). ‘A’isha, the favorite wife of Muhammad, was once asked:“Mother of the Believers, what did the Prophet do when he was athome?” She answered, “What any of you will normally do at home.He would patch his garment and repair his sandals. Most of thetime, he sewed.”2 And so we have this marvelous image of the greatprophet of Islam sitting cross-legged at home and, with thread andneedle, sewing happily away—and what a feast this tableau isfor the imagination! Did he whistle softly as he sewed? Was hegood at threading the needle? But there he is, sharing the domes-ticity of his followers and in his daily life he was indistinguish-able from the masses among whom his prophetic career ran itscourse.

But to turn once again to the dilemmas of biography, let us as-sume for a moment that the main task of biography is to answer


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the question What was he or she like? What were they really like?And let us suppose that in answer to this question a biographertakes a grid and proceeds to place it on the life of the biographee.This grid might then reveal a sort of graph, perhaps, of youth, ma-turity, old age, a chronological graph wherein the subject’s life be-comes readied for narrative. But being a grid, one can bisect it inall sorts of ways. The biographer can, for instance, divide it intothemes such as the politician, the exile, the writer, the social re-former, the farmer, and so forth. Or the biographer can combinethe two strategies. But whatever strategy is adopted, the question“What was he or she really like?” still looms large, inescapable. Wehave not really solved the problem by cutting the subject’s lifeup into manageable or comprehensible units or categories andthemes. We have not resolved the dilemma. Is life so tidy that wecan draw it as a graph? “A biography,” writes Virginia Woolf, “isconsidered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves,whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.”3 JulianBarnes uses the image of a fisherman’s net: “The trawling net fills,the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets andsells. Yet consider what he doesn’t catch: there is always far moreof that.”4 I like to think that between them these two writers shat-tered the illusion of biography as a tidy and well-structured life.One can no longer ask what a person was really like. We are nowin an age where a biography, instead of being called The Life of X,will almost as often be entitled The Invention of X. Hence, given boththe untidiness of the outward and contingent events impinging ona life, and the untidiness of inward behavior, how can one possiblywrite a tidy biography? If a biography is to be an accurate, truth-ful reflection of a life, should it not itself be untidy, cluttered, dis-organized, muddled, unfathomable?

The early biographies of Muhammad will often seem to a mod-ern (postmodern?) reader to be as disorganized and untidy as anyfollower of Woolf or Barnes might wish them to be. In their early


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days the writers of these biographies remind one of JulianBarnes’s fisherman, frantically hauling in every conceivable inci-dent in Muhammad’s life and heaping them one on top of the otherin a motley assemblage of facts. For the pious biographer, no inci-dent, however trivial, must ever escape his net. The overall impres-sion is one of immense density of detail, confusing to all but theexperts. Aware perhaps of the dangers of this untidiness, laterMuslim biographers who reflected more deeply on the uses towhich Muhammad’s biography could be put imposed a grid uponhis life, seeing in it certain neat patterns, certain divisions thatappeared to reflect divine dispensation and order. There wasno question in the mind of any biographer, early or late, thatMuhammad’s life was traceable and knowable. However, a tidyframework had to be found within which the innumerable and of-ten contradictory versions of what the Prophet said and what hedid could be fitted. Many, especially later, biographers were tocriticize with great severity some early biographical accounts asunworthy of the Prophet or as interpolations by heretics. His lifehad to be pruned of myth or parti pris in order to reveal whatMuhammad was really like. All the details of that life had to bemade to cohere with his prophetic persona.

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But let us pass now from the theoretical dilemmas of biography toexamine some of the uses to which biography has been put. Thesereflections are cast in general terms but will highlight Islamic andMuhammadan biography in particular. To what end was biogra-phy used? What function, individual or social, did it serve? To an-swer these questions, it might perhaps be best if we adopt abroadly historical approach. I shall not attempt anything otherthan a very general sketch of the history of the use to which biog-


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raphy has been put, desiring merely to contextualize the many im-ages of Muhammad that this book will eventually examine.

If we cast our eyes over the long history of biography, we maybe able to detect three or four principal uses or aims of biography:

1. To provide inspiring examples to be imitated,2. To celebrate famous men and women of a particular

nation,3. To exalt the self-image of a particular profession or

group, and4. To show how a particular life took on a meaningful

shape (bildungsroman).5

I have alluded already to one or two of these uses of biography,and I propose now to say a few things about each. In most cases Iwill try to give one prominent example from the classical orChristian European tradition of biography and one or more fromthe Muslim, which remains my main focus. Needless to add, theseuses of biography are not exclusive; one use will often include an-other.

In the history of the Western European tradition of biography,most influential in the beginning were the biographies of theRoman historian Plutarch (first century A.D.) and his Parallel Livesof famous Greeks and Romans, forty-six in number, arrayed inpairs; the aim here is to give a true portrait of the biographee, andthe truth of the portrait makes the human lesson to be learned allthe more valuable. These portraits are moral stories in miniatureand so are told in such a way that their subject can best be imi-tated. A superman cannot teach a man much of value. Thus we getthe “warts and all” approach to biography, the man or woman withall his or her human virtues and vices, who draws near enough tous in humanity so that we can imitate that person. The humanistic


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approach to biography remains to the present day one of the ma-jor purposes or uses of biography. I shall call it the “humanistic”purpose of biography, for short. The Muslim tradition of biogra-phy also contains a distinct humanistic purpose or approach.There are many elements in the traditional life of Muhammad thathis biographers have used to bring him near to us by picturing himas an ordinary, frail, fallible human being, thus making his life eas-ily followed and imitated. Muhammad, not being privy to the se-crets of men’s hearts, says the great Andalusian biographer al-Qadi‘Iyad (d. 1149), may well have delivered some wrong verdicts, butthis merely makes it more urgent for his community to strive to im-itate his endeavor to arrive at the truth.6 We see him at many mo-ments of his life as lonely, injured, afraid, doubtful, and weak asany of us; as anguished, troubled, and uncertain of where he is go-ing as the rest of humanity. There is the famous story in theMuslim biographical tradition in which the farmers of Medinaseek his advice about whether or not to pollinate their palm trees.He advises them not to pollinate. They obey his advice and the re-sult is the total ruin of the date season in Medina. When the farm-ers complain gently to him about this misadventure, he replies,{You are more knowledgeable about your worldly affairs than Iam.} And there are instances where, when Muhammad pro-nounces some opinion on something, he is asked, “O Prophet ofGod, is this God speaking through you [that is, does this havebinding legal force?] or are you giving us an ordinary human opin-ion?” The implication is that we will obey you unquestioningly inthe first case, but we might not obey you in the second. We will re-turn to some of these issues later, but it seems fairly clear that thecontrast drawn between the divinely inspired pronouncements ofthe Prophet of God and the portrait of Muhammad the man wasseen by his biographers as an important distinction, a pointer tothe use of his life as a model of conduct.

Now for the second use of biography, namely to commemorate


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or celebrate famous men and women of a particular nation. Thisuse of biography is also of perennial prevalence; the emphasis is oncelebrating a community, a nation, a people through the lives of itsoutstanding men and women. One might call it the nationalist-heroic use of biography. The principal aim is not so much imita-tion, although this is not excluded, but communal celebration.Here the biography resembles a long obituary or a eulogy deliv-ered at a memorial service. In other words, the biography sets outto show how an individual human being embodied the virtues orachievements of a larger group, and so the work is as much a cel-ebration of the group as it is of the individual biographee. In theclassical tradition, the Agricola of Tacitus (d. ca. 122 A.D.) is one ofthe earliest and most influential of this genre. Agricola was aRoman governor, a model of how the Roman Empire can best beruled. His life by Tacitus embodies the best attributes of Romanrule such as wisdom, the ascendancy of law, civilization, peace:Rome is thereby portrayed as the worthy mistress of the civilizedworld.

The Islamic tradition of biography displays a similar use, thatis, biography used for commemoration or celebration. Thus, in thelife of Muhammad one finds a celebratory element, a nationalist-heroic approach when we encounter Muhammad in the midst ofhis community. It is as if he stands at the very center of an ever-expanding series of concentric circles of believers. An interestingdebate can be heard among Islam’s earliest historians: How is aCompanion (Sahabi) of Muhammad to be defined? Who qualifiesfor this honor and how? Are all contemporaries of Muhammadto be counted as Companions or only those who actually sawhim and/or submitted to his faith? To celebrate Muhammad as heshould be celebrated one must also celebrate his earliest umma, thecommunity of the faithful who heard his message and followed itheroically, and against overwhelming odds. Conversely, Muhammadhimself embodies the virtues of his umma. He is divinely selected


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from among the best of nations, and he himself is the best of his na-tion, of his tribe, of his clan, and of his family. His life will also ofcourse personify the religious message to his nation. When ‘A’ishawas asked, “What was Muhammad’s moral character like?” she re-sponded, “His moral character was the Qur’an.”7 Muhammad’s lifeepitomized the virtues of his nation as well as his own religiousmessage.

The third use of biography, the exaltation of a particular groupor profession, can be dealt with more briefly since it is not directlyrelevant to Muhammad. In the early Christian tradition, the genreof biography called the Lives of the Saints is an early example ofthis exaltation of a group. In the Muslim tradition, the Companionsof Muhammad were among the earliest biographees. Biographyhere serves to designate and exalt a group whose members gaintheir elevated status from their association with the original sacredfigure. These Companions became the earliest spiritual heroes ofIslam. The shadow that Muhammad cast was eventually to gener-ate many biographies whose purpose was to exalt his family, for in-stance, or else other groups who in one way or another mostpiously followed his example. Out of these works would evolve agenre of biography called the Manaqib, or “Virtues,” of thesegroups. A well-known exponent of this genre, Muhibb al-Din al-Tabari (d. 1294), puts it as follows: “The Almighty has elevated inrank all who have any relationship or kinship to Muhammad, allwho aided or followed him, and made it incumbent on His crea-tures to love all his near relations, his family and their progeny.”8

The bildungsroman is usually defined as a novel that deals witha person’s formative years or spiritual education. When we applythis term to biography, we get a kind of biography that aims toshow how early formation or development helped to explain spiri-tual evolution, and how the biographee gained in wisdom as lifecarried him or her forward. This element can be seen in biogra-phies of Muhammad in which his early life and his preparation for


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the prophetic mission are shown to be essential to his later career.For instance, there are elements like the fact that he was born anorphan, the fact that he was born trustworthy (but not perhapssinless, a theme to be dealt with later), the fact that he was fromthe beginning a meditative individual, the fact that he endured somuch suffering and ridicule—as well as indications that these earlyepisodes of his life prepared and educated him for his calling andwere an essential prelude to his mission.

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I end these reflections with a historical sketch of Western bio-graphical concepts followed by a similar sketch of Islamic con-cepts. The object is to keep in view certain trends in biographicalwriting that are relevant to the images of Muhammad and to theirconception and reconception across the centuries. In the Westerntradition one notices a fairly constant conception of biographyfrom Plutarch to the nineteenth century. Biography was through-out this period largely dominated by the model type, inspiring im-itation, and was largely nationalist-heroic and celebratory in style.Biography is defined in terms of the public life, and if there are oc-casional glimpses of the private life, these glimpses are secondaryor auxiliary to the public life: they reinforce the public image. Inall cases, biography teaches by personal example. Instead of read-ing about, for example, the sense of duty, you read a life of some-one who embodies the true meaning of duty. And instead ofreading about a nation, you read the life of someone who embod-ies the life of the nation. Biography is a vivid moral lesson. Insteadof the dry and boring sermon, you listen to or read the story of anindividual, a far more interesting proposition.

Beginning, however, with the romantic movement of the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth century, Western European biog-raphy underwent an important transformation. The practitioners


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of romantic biography advanced the notion that a life is often fartoo complex to be a true model for others; that we are all a mixtureof virtue and vice; that biography to be true and useful must reflectthe whole personality of a man or woman, both reason and emo-tions, both the rational and the irrational, both moments of nobility and courage and moments of cowardice and nastiness.Romantic writers undermined the ideal of a model by postulatingthat a life full of virtue only is not a life at all but a fantasy. The greatest practitioner in the nineteenth century was ThomasCarlyle, whose influence on biography in the West was consider-able, and who of course attempted a biographical sketch ofMuhammad.9

The next big step in Western biography is represented by thegreat biographical enterprise called the Dictionary of NationalBiography in the late nineteenth century, under the editorship ofLeslie Stephen. The principles adopted by that enterprise wereheavily influenced by dominant scientific ideas of the age, the ageof the spectacular triumph of sciences such as geology, biology,and evolution. And so, where biography is concerned, we demandof it that a life should be as factual and accurate as possible, andthat aspects of a life should be put in their rightful compartmentsor drawers. A life therefore should be categorized, it should havea taxonomy, it should be classified. For example, the thinking orthoughts or philosophy or whatever of an individual should betreated separately from his or her life. So too should the militaryexploits, the professional career, and so forth. If judgment is to bepassed on a life, it should be balanced and moderate; the biogra-pher must not pretend to be God and know all about the bi-ographee. So here are the biographical facts all nicely packagedand classified like exhibits in a museum: one might call it biogra-phy as a scientific exhibit. The moral or lesson of the life is nolonger a prominent feature. The model to be imitated is no longera central issue in biography.10


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The next big step in Western biography was to serve as an in-strument for psychoanalysis, associated with Sigmund Freud.11

Freud wrote only two biographies in the strict sense of the term:his lives of Leonardo da Vinci and of Woodrow Wilson. In the firstbiography, which concerns us more directly, much is made ofLeonardo’s dream of the vulture, an early cradle memory. Leonardois reported to have recollected that a vulture had come down,opened his mouth with its tail, and struck his lips with the tail manytimes. Freud then uses this vision to psychoanalyze Leonardo, al-though the details of this analysis do not concern us here.12 What isclear is that Freud wanted to explore biography as an analytic tool,as a procedure for probing the personality, a way of uncoveringwhat is hidden or forbidden or taboo in a life. So for Freud thebiographee becomes a patient. We start with a person’s dreams,visions, early memories, fantasies (the manifest content) and wework inward to the real content, to what the person is hiding. Thisprocedure has had a great deal of influence on modern biography.It was Freud who first dealt with an individual psyche as deeplyunpublic. We are all of us to varying degrees neurotic, unstable,contradictory. And in the traditional Muslim biographies ofMuhammad, Freud would have found in the accounts of theProphet’s life, had he bothered to examine them, a very large num-ber of visions, early memories, dreams, and so forth, most notablythe incident of the opening of Muhammad’s breast as a child, whichwould have kept Freud happy for many years. Indeed, a Freudianbiography of Muhammad would be much appreciated. In hisMuhammad the French scholar Maxime Rodinson attempted some-thing that may vaguely be called a Freudian approach, but withresults too timid to qualify as pathbreaking. The influence of Freudon biography is still strong in the West. Freudian biography hasbeen attacked from many quarters, for example, because thebiographee cannot act as a living patient. Nevertheless, much biog-raphical writing today includes a section on the childhood experi-


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ences and visions of the biographee and the attempt, Freudian or àla Freud, to discover in that childhood an important key to later de-velopments. To that extent Freud was an advocate of the bil-dungsroman.

Of later developments I will not say much. But after Freud thefragmented personality, the mixture of fact and fancy in any hu-man life, takes on a new meaning in modern biography. Is any hu-man life really knowable? Can we really ascertain all the whys andwherefores like the laws of chemistry? Can we ever write a trulycomplete life in an orderly fashion? If a human life has no pattern,how can biography have a pattern? If a life is a sort of heap offacts, emotions, accidents, and so forth, then biography, as we haveseen in the remarks of Virginia Woolf, should perhaps look like aheap also. What we are witnessing nowadays in Western bio-graphical writing is the advent of what one might call postmod-ernist biography, or perhaps the application of the uncertaintyprinciple to biographical writing. A recent and telling example isMary Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison. This biography stead-fastly refuses to replace uncertainty with speculation. Biographyfascinates us precisely because it cannot pin a person down.Beard’s Harrison raises the following questions: Why should conti-nuity be the mark of a life and not discontinuity? Can one reallydistinguish within a life between major and minor events? Can wereally compartmentalize the life of a human being? Are we oneperson or many? Can we ever know what happens behind bed-room doors?

But let me turn now to the Muslim side of the question, to asketch of the history of Muhammadan biography in Islamic cul-ture. One might note that at several points the problems and chal-lenges of biography will appear to be similar in the Islamic and inthe Western Christian cultural traditions. I have already givensome examples previously in discussing the use of biography, for


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example, humanistic, nationalist-heroic, and so forth. The earliestMuslim biographical writing ran along two parallel lines: the Siraof Muhammad and the tabaqat of his companions.

Th e S i r a o f M u h a m m a d

A sira is a path through life and so by extension a biography, butthe Sira (with a capital S, as it were) is the life of Muhammad. TheSira contains sunna, the latter setting out in a systematic fashion theProphet’s customary or normative behavior, that which must byand large be imitated or obeyed. The Sira narrates and charts theoutward facts of his life, whereas the sunna is its ethical/legal con-tent. The two, as stated above, are sometimes confused and spokenof in the same breath. This mixture of the two elements is not sur-prising, given that we are dealing with a prophet who teaches bypersonal example. Every detail of his personal and public life is po-tentially of legal or ethical interest for the believer.

But while the Sira of Muhammad continued over time tobe an independent genre of narrative biography, the sunna ofMuhammad was eventually collected in standardized Hadith, thename given to the “Traditions” of Muhammad, his pronounce-ments or his actions that have moral or legal content and that func-tion as a guide to the believers. In sum, the Sira is the narrativebiography of Muhammad, while the sunna is the record of his legalor normative example and action. The Sira takes its earliest shapewith the celebrated Sira of Ibn Ishaq (d. 767); the sunna begins tocohere in collections of the mid-ninth century.13 No longer a narra-tive, the hadith marked out, systematized, and sacralized sunna, ar-ranging it under the principal features of the good Muslim life(faith, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, and so forth). The Sira on theother hand pursued the path of narrative. There is a great deal of


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overlap in biographical content between the two genres, but instyle, presentation, and objectives they are wholly different.

Th e Ta b a q a t

The second early genre of biography is the tabaqat. Tabaqa means“a generation,” and the tabaqat (plural) that occupied early Muslimbiographers were first of all the Companions of Muhammad, theSahaba, then those who followed them (Tabi‘un), then the follow-ers of the followers (tabi‘u al-tabi‘in), then the religious scholarsand men of learning of later generations. The first systematizerof the tabaqat genre was Ibn Sa‘d (d. 845). These biographiesare arranged more or less by religious importance: the majorCompanions get large biographies, the minor ones less so. IbnSa‘d’s introduction is made up of an important Sira, still consid-ered, with those of Ibn Ishaq, al-Baladhuri (d. 892), and al-Tabari(d. 923), one of the four major early Siras of Muhammad; let us callthem the four founding fathers of early Muhammadan Sira. Wewill have occasion to take a closer look at them later.

What Islamic biography in the strict sense do we have inIslam’s first three centuries or so? The Sira and the tabaqat. Thefirst concentrated on Muhammad’s life as narrative, the second onMuhammad’s community. These two biographical genres have runconcurrently to the present day, that is, biography alongside the bi-ographical dictionary. This latter was to become a distinguishingfeature of Islamic culture, an immensely rich source on premodernMuslims and their lives. No premodern civilization has ever pro-duced so many biographies or biographical sketches of its men andwomen. Up to about the nineteenth century it was the tabaqatgenre that typified Islamic biographical literature, carrying for-ward that early conception of Muhammad standing in the midst ofan ever-expanding community.


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Meanwhile, and for many centuries, the Sira of Muhammadovershadowed all other biographies. Whose Sira could possiblyhave a remotely similar value? This early or formative period ofIslam is the one that the great Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) dubbed the“Age of Awe and Amazement” (Dhuhul). This “awe” might par-tially explain why the Muhammadan Sira was the predominantsira in the strict sense in this early period, even though other earlyMuslims were commemorated in biographical notices of varyinglengths in the dictionaries. It was only with the coming of the ageof the great warrior-sultans of the eleventh century onward thatthe Sira genre began to expand to include other great heroes ofIslam. Not only the great sultans were given separate and distinctbiographies but also, for instance, great mystics were held up asmodels of spirituality, as well as other ancient Islamic heroes, forexample, the caliphs ‘Umar I and II. Many of these biographieswere designed to show how the biographee conformed to orotherwise re-created through glorious exploits the example ofMuhammad.

If, at this point, my readers require some rough and ready pe-riodization of the trajectory of Muhammad’s images, I will venturethe following. We have, to begin with, the four founding fathers ofthe Sira. Between them Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa‘d, al-Baladhuri, and al-Tabari laid down the basic framework of Muhammad’s life andmuch of its narrative content. Theirs is a Sira of primitive devotion,a Sira that stands so much in awe of its subject that it gathers in itsnet all the reports that fall into it, paying little or no heed to theirconsistency. The guiding principle is inclusion rather than exclu-sion, and if there are stories or anecdotes about the Prophet thatmay offend the sensibilities of Muslims, the idea is that it is betterfor them to remain where they are than be excised because of anypretensions to piety. Next comes an age during which theMuhammadan Sira was subjected to critical assessment in order toprune it of superstition and heresy. From primitive devotion, we


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move to an age in which the Sira of Muhammad can be describedas canonical, moral, exclusivist, and rationalizing. It is onlythrough such pruning that the Sira can become usable by the be-liever as a guide to moral conduct. I would nominate the famousSira of the Andalusian al-Qadi ‘Iyad (d. 1149) as typifying this de-velopment in the image of the Prophet. Muhammad’s superhumanqualities—his pre-eternity, miraculous powers, and sinlessness—are asserted in order to fortify the faith of his followers, but as anobject of love and devotion he remains humanly imitable. Otherexamples of this new genre of Sira might include the Sira entitledal-Rawd al-Unuf by Abu al-Qasim al-Suhayli (d. 1185), in essencea running critical commentary on the Sira of Ibn Ishaq, one of thefounding fathers. Examples might also include the later al-Sira al-Halabiyya by Abu’l Faraj Nur al-Din al-Halabi (d. 1635), whichsets out to demonstrate how one can introduce consistency and co-herence into the divergent historical versions of the Sira.

Finally, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth cen-tury a new breed of the Sira of Muhammad began to appear: thepolemical Sira, written largely to defend Muhammad’s reputationagainst the attacks of European Orientalists. The first direct en-counter between Muslim scholars and the new breed of EuropeanOrientalists over the life and personality of Muhammad took placeduring the heyday of European colonial rule of large regions of theMuslim world. Muhammad had been attacked consistently inEuropean and/or Christian circles since at least the eighth century,but these attacks were either unknown or ignored in the Muslimworld. In seventeenth-century Europe, Orientalism began to ap-pear as a scientific discipline, and biographies of Muhammadbased directly and “scientifically” on Islamic sources were pub-lished. It was against this backdrop of a “scientific” European as-sault on Muhammad, which reached its peak in the late nineteenthand twentieth centuries, that a new breed of Islamic biographies ofMuhammad began to take shape, first perhaps in Muslim India


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and later in Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere. These works can broadlybe described as defensive, polemical, and global in structure andargument. Typical of this new type of Sira is Hayat Muhammad(The Life of Muhammad) by the Egyptian Muhammad HusaynHaykal (d. 1956), which was addressed at least as much to theOrientalists as to the ordinary Muslim believer.

I come to the end of these reflections on Muhammad and biog-raphy. These reflections were meant to be suggestive, to evoke thekind of subject matter to which this work is dedicated. If they arefound to be incomplete or overgeneralized, I can only plead thatthe rest of what I have to say might introduce some of the refine-ments and details that such a study must obviously entail. Fromthe great Andalusian biographer al-Qadi ‘Iyad, once again, comesthe following passage on prophets, by way of concluding these in-troductory reflections and preparing for what is to come:

Prophets and Messengers, peace be upon them, are intermedi-

aries between God and His creatures. They transmit to them the

commands of God and His prohibitions, His promise of salva-

tion and threat of damnation. They acquaint them with what

they do not know of Him, of His creation, majesty, sovereignty,

omnipotence and realm. The outward appearance of prophets,

their bodies and their physiques possess the characteristics

of humans and are subject to what humans undergo by way of

contingency, disease, death, dissolution and other attributes of

humanity. Their souls and inward existence, however, are char-

acterized by super-human attributes which link them to the

heavenly spheres, making them resemble the angels. They are

therefore free from change and error, and not normally subject

to human incapacity and weakness.14


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